Photoshop How To

The last thing most folks want to do these days is swap a beautiful sunny day for a threatening rainstorm with lightning. But we’re talking Photoshop here, and the tutorial below demonstrates how to mess around with Mother Nature and turn a welcoming landscape photo into something far more dramatic.

Instructor Marty Geller begins by explaining how to replace the fair weather sky in his original image with an ominous one full of rain clouds. He then demonstrates how to refine the foreground layer with adjustments to brightness and contrast, hue and saturation, and overall exposure.

Creating two rain layers is the next step in the process and it’s easier to accomplish than you may think. It simply involves adding noise and motion blur at the appropriate angle. Finally, Geller walks you through the steps for adding lightning to the scene and creating a bit of illumination in the clouds.

While there are numerous steps in this process, Geller provides detailed instructions for each one, leaving nothing to guesswork. You can see more from Geller on his YouTube channel, and check out an earlier Photoshop tutorial we posted explaining how to expand the dynamic range of a photo for added impact.